NetBeans 5 Beta 2 - A Big Tasty Bag of Beans

If you haven’t already tried Beta 1 of NetBeans 5, the new Beta 2 is definitely worth a test-drive. Beta 1 already seemed pretty stable, but this latest release has a surprising 1,880 bugs fixed.

In addition, the Beta release includes new support for developing IDE modules and “rich client” apps. The redesigned CVS support is rather nice; and it’s good to see that there’s editor support for WebLogic 9 and JBoss 4. Here's a complete list of the new features.

NetBeans continues to enjoy its revival. It’s progressed a long way over the last 12 months. Although this new version is incredibly cool, I’m excited to see where its creators will have taken the product in another year’s time.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, Eclipse last week released Milestone 3 of Eclipse Platform 3.2

And (scampering back to the Sun/NetBeans world) early-access junkies can also get hold of the Early Access 2 release of Sun's "other" Java IDE, the named-by-committee Sun Java Studio Creator (which also happens to be based on the very capable NetBeans platform).

About the Author

Matt Stephens is a senior architect, programmer and project leader based in Central London. He co-wrote Agile Development with ICONIX Process, Extreme Programming Refactored, and Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML - Theory and Practice.